TY - JOUR AB - Purpose The purpose of this paper is to gain insights of the use of social media (SM) in the wine industry. The theoretical viewpoint is to analyse wineries’ SM segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) to help the wine industry to improve the effectiveness of SM communication.Design/methodology/approach An observational study of Spanish wineries’ SM presence and traffic was carried out during a three-month period in 2013 and repeated in 2016. During this period, a questionnaire was distributed to 196 wineries. Logistic regression was used to model the dichotomous outcome variable of whether a winery “does” or “does not” utilise SM. Additionally, leader wineries were interviewed in April/May 2016 about SM STP.Findings The results show that most wineries are starting in SM without a well-defined strategy. The presence of a webpage is significantly related to the use of SM. SM wineries do not segment and can take advantage of digital targeting strategies.Practical implications Segmentation and targeting SM can improve the effectiveness of the winery SM activities as well as the winery competitiveness in the wine industry.Originality/value This paper is a first step in understanding the value of segmentation SM to reach millennial consumers and the importance of targeting to improve the effectiveness of winery on SM. VL - 29 IS - 3 SN - 1751-1062 DO - 10.1108/IJWBR-08-2016-0030 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWBR-08-2016-0030 AU - Fuentes Fernández Rosana AU - Vriesekoop Frank AU - Urbano Beatriz PY - 2017 Y1 - 2017/01/01 TI - Social media as a means to access millennial wine consumers T2 - International Journal of Wine Business Research PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 269 EP - 284 Y2 - 2024/04/26 ER -